The tide has turned

Page Tools

Despite heartbreak, illness and the death of new wave,
Blondie's heart of glass keeps pumping, the band's leading man
tells George Palathingal.

It's more than 30 years since a young guitarist called Chris
Stein fell for the striking frontwoman of the girl-group cover band
the Stilettos in a New York bar.

By late 1974, Stein and his girlfriend, Debbie Harry, had formed
the new-wave sensation Blondie. They spent the next eight years
making some of the greatest pop songs of the 20th century, until a
debilitating skin condition put Stein out of action.

The 55-year-old guitarist has long since recovered and now faces
one inescapable question. With deserved icon status among its peers
as well as their fans and a near-perfect back catalogue, why is the
ageing Blondie threatening their legacy - not to mention dignity -
by continuing to tour and make new music?

Before I get to ask the question, idle ice-breaking chat about
Stein's responsibilities as a relatively new father (and with a
second child on the way) reveals part of the answer.

"Y'know, to do it properly ... I don't have as much money as
f---ing John Lennon," he deadpans.

Many would assume that, as the (co-)writer of Heart of Glass,
Sunday Girl and Rapture, among other Blondie classics,
Stein would be living large on an endless stream of royalty
cheques. "No, no, we didn't do very well with the whole situation,"
Stein says. "If we'd come along 10 years later, I'm sure we would
have done a lot better, but in those days we were victims of the
old sort of feudal systems that existed in the music industry. It
was our own fault for not paying more attention."

Being a musician in New York City in the late 1970s and early
'80s did have its advantages. "I think a lot of art arrives in
depressed times, when people were hungry," Stein says. "I don't
think all this ... plasticised reality that we live in, in the big
urban areas now, lends itself to good art. There may have been a
certain advantage to the sort of desperation, tension that went on,
and danger of the big cities at the time."

Such tension helped Blondie's main creative force: the
songwriting partnership of Stein and Harry. The hits kept flowing,
including some inspired cover versions (Hanging on the
Telephone, Denis, The Tide is High), until 1981, when the
autoimmune disorder pemphigus vulgaris took its grip on Stein's
life and brought the band to a seemingly abrupt end.

"Well, it was at the peak, but we were kind of burnt out and
exhausted, which was exacerbated by my health getting that way,"
Stein says. "It only lasted from about '81, '82, for about another
three or four years after that. It didn't go

on for very long." He says the autoimmune condition is still
widely unknown. "But there's a lot more known about it now. I hear
from people who have it, occasionally."

Was he incapacitated at the time? "When I was all screwed up,
yeah ... all the proteins that bind your skin break down, so you're
covered with blisters. It's a totally stress-related condition, I'm
convinced."

And it has never recurred? "No, I never had it back. It was
definitely part of using drugs, getting stoned all the time, too.
That brought it on with that much ferocity."

Harry stood by her man until he recovered, but in 1986 their
romantic relationship ended.

Here, of course, is where the Blondie story should have ended,
too. But in 1999, two other members of the band - keyboard player
Jimmy Destri and drummer Clem Burke - rejoined Stein and Harry to
make the comeback album No Exit. Despite the
vintage-sounding single Maria, the album was soon forgotten,
but the four kept making music together. They attempted a second
comeback with last year's surprisingly strong but commercially
underwhelming The Curse of Blondie.

Creative tension still courses through the Blondie camp. Destri,
who appeared with the band during its 2003 Australian tour, won't
be coming this time. Why not? "Jimmy's just crazy," Stein says
wearily. "It's difficult with his issues, whatever.

It's like with the Ramones thing, y'know? It's not like there's
any great love lost between anybody. I hope Jimmy can write some
stuff for us if we do another Blondie record."

Stein is unsentimental, even cynical, when it's suggested that
the New York punk/new-wave scene Blondie thrived in is edging ever
further away with the death of yet another Ramone, Johnny, last
September. "It's so idealised now they're all [sic] dead," Stein
says.

"It always helps to drop dead. It helps your art."

There will be another difference from the 2003 shows. Shortly
before that tour, Stein became a father for the first time and
chose to spend those first few months with his son Akira rather
than with the band. "The second [child's] not gonna interfere with
my coming down!" he says, laughing.

His firstborn's Japanese name hints at one of Stein's passions
outside music: Asian cinema.

"There's a whole genre of Asian sort of science-fiction ghost
and fantasy movies that are just - I mean, it's just better stuff
coming out," he says. "Hollywood is just ... for me, it's sadder
what's happened in Hollywood than what's happened in the music
industry as far as 'art by committee' [goes], y'know?

"The fact that people, their main motivation is financial for
making art these days, rather than to make art. There are a couple
of people left in Hollywood - [Martin] Scorsese and a couple of
others."

Stein gets a lot off his chest via regular posts on the Blondie
website, with one particularly entertaining rant relating to last
year's remake of The Manchurian Candidate.

"I was so freaked out by seeing how much they f---ed that up,"
he says in disbelief. "They took it away from its political base!
Y'know, they made the bad guys be this sort of big corporate
entity, which is absurd - completely twisted the message and intent
of this original film."

It seems his online activity might be cathartic. "Sort of," he
says. "I get a lot of response; I have an ongoing dialogue with
people. I get a few people telling me to shut the f--- up and I'm
just a guitar player and shouldn't write about politics ... there
was always a dialogue with Debbie and me and the band - mostly with
me and Debbie - about whether or not we should make any overt
political statements, or whether just making people entertained was
enough of a good thing to do as a mission."

It was more than enough at their 2003 shows. "Yeah?" Stein asks.
"Well, that's good. And it should be better if I'm there, too!"